1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to paintball filling systems, and, more specifically, to a system for refilling multiple paintball pods simultaneously.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the sport of paintball, players use gas-powered guns to shoot water-soluble paint-filled capsules at each other. Paintball games may take a variety of forms including warfare simulation among two adversarial teams, or modified versions of traditional games such as capture the flag. Modem paintball guns have high repeat firing rates, allowing a player to shoot multiple paintballs at an opponent in a short span of time. The combination of high firing rates with inaccurate, sometimes unpredictable, trajectories taken by the paintballs often results in hundreds of paintballs being expended by each player during a paintball game.
To reduce the chances of running out of paintball ammunition during a game, players typically carry several paintball pods or tubes each containing from 100-200 paintballs. These pods can be opened and emptied into a hopper on a player's gun as necessary during the game. While the paintball pods offer convenient reloading of the gun during an ongoing game, the pods themselves have proven quite cumbersome and difficult to reload. Many players attempt to load the pods by hand one handful of paintballs at a time. Others attempt to pour the paintballs through a hole cut in the plastic bag in which the paintballs were packaged for sale. Both of these methods are cumbersome and inefficient. It can also be time consuming because only one pod is refilled at a time. The cumbersome nature of the conventional paintball pod filling techniques often results in many dropped paintballs. Dropped paintballs are typically discarded for fear of contaminating and prematurely wearing the shooting mechanism of a paintball gun. Therefore, dropped paintballs often represent a significant wasted expenditure by a paintball player. Often a team that is able to refill quickly in a paintball game has a distinct advantage.
Several paintball pod filling devices have been proposed to improve reloading of paintball pods and reduce the incidence of spilled paintballs. However, these devices have all had significant shortcomings. Most of these devices are essentially funnels having a spout designed to fit a single paintball pod. Since only a single paintball pod may be filled with one of these devices, filling several paintball pods is still a time consuming affair as each pod must be filled separately. Also, each disconnection of a pod from the funnel is an opportunity for paintball spillage from either the newly-filled pod or from the funnel. Multiple spout funnels to fill multiple paintball pods simultaneously have also been attempted. While the multiple-spout configuration may allow simultaneous filling of multiple paintball pods, no mechanism exists to stop the flow of paintballs from the funnels once the pods have been filled. Thus, these multiple spout configurations are especially prone to paintball spillage when the funnel is removed from paintball pods. Therefore, there remains a need for a paintball filling system capable of quickly filling one or more paintball pods simultaneously with a greatly reduced risk of paintball spillage.